


We are the witches they weren't able to burn

by Cuits



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-01 05:06:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4006948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cuits/pseuds/Cuits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Furiosa stays and Max goes but maybe one day he will come back or maybe one day she'd leave for the desert again.</p><p> <br/><i>“Who are you?” asks the little boy who has just gotten off the car.</i></p><p>   <i>“We are the granddaughters of the witches they didn't manage to burn,” says Cheedo, her voice a fearful sound.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	We are the witches they weren't able to burn

Max goes away from the Citadel but he doesn’t _leave_ ; one has to belong to a place to be able to leave it and he doesn’t belong there. It has been too long since he has belonged anywhere. Sometimes he convinces himself that he never did, that the shreds of images and sounds are not memories but remnants of treacherous dreams; the rest of the time nightmares convince him.

 

He takes a car that the War Boys left behind and goes away, heads for the desert once again, taking the roads one at a time hoping that neither of them will lead him to redemption, to sanity, to an end. Hope is a dangerous thing, too much of a dangerous thing for him, so he drives the roads, breathes dust and drinks sand as the merciless sun sets his skin on fire.

 

Nevertheless he survives. That’s it. That’s what he does.

 

He runs from scavengers and fights them when he can’t outrun them anymore, never thinking of going back because he was never really there in the first place. He never looks back because his rearview mirror doesn’t reach that far.

 

He doesn't think of that place with water and green, doesn't think of Furiosa or the Wives or the fight with Immortan Joe until he takes down a handful of Motor Heads that intended to steal from him  and finds them chained to the inner rock wall of a short cave, wary and tense like cornered beasts. He takes the supplies that are on the cave and puts them in his trunk before unchaining them and he ignores the defiance in their stares as he liberates their wrists.

 

“Who are you? What do you want?” asks one of them with a little voice full of ire but he doesn’t answer and as soon as the three of them are free from the chains they move quickly as lizards to grab sticks and stones from the ground.

 

“What do you want?” repeats the girl and he doesn’t even wonder how much would it take for him to defend himself from three girls that barely reach his waist.

 

“Nothing,” he says this time, his voice is broken and rash, unused.

 

He is about to turn himself around and keep on driving but there is something in the way that they fight that keeps him from doing it and the part of him that still remembers how to estimate a child’s age angrily protests the thought of abandoning three ten year olds to their own poor luck.

 

“You three are coming with me.”

 

He hasn’t even finished pronouncing the last word when a little hand releases a fist shaped rock aimed at his head so he disarms them and ties them to the backseat of his car without a speck of delicacy. Delicacy is for weak things and these girls are neither the first nor the second.

 

“Shut up and listen,” he says to them. “I can take you to a place of green and water or I can leave you here to walk the desert or wait for the Motor Heads to wake up.”

 

They go very quiet, with their hard stares fixed on his nape as he starts the engine. Max pretends not to hear one of them say that they have a better chance of taking one man down than they have of taking ten but he can’t help the small curve of his mouth.

 

He drives miles and miles to the north, towards a place that he has no right to remember and when the stars are high in the sky and the asphyxiating heat of the day has given way to the shattering cold of night there is movement in the backseat.

 

“If you touch me or any of my sisters, I will rip your heart out and eat it.”

 

He doesn’t question her or her intentions, he doesn’t even question the bond between the girls even though their complexion and skin color are too different and their ages too similar. They seems sisters all right to him.

 

Max locks eyes with the girl in the rearview mirror and the intense determination of her gaze almost makes him feel a pang of an emotion that some would consider nostalgia. There is a brightness in her dark brown eyes that is sad and tenacious, a brightness too old for any human being stomping the Earth. She has the eyes of a warrior, this girl, the eyes of a former Imperator.

 

“I believe you,” he says, and so he does.

 

\---------------------------------------------------------

 

Redemption is a ten letter word written on history books.

 

Furiosa doesn’t have time to rest and wait for her wounds to heal. The Citadel needs to protect itself from the Half-Lives they have left out of its rock walls, from the war lords who think they deserve to have it and rule them all.

 

They don’t have any War Rigs left, nothing close to it. They have a dozen minor vehicles poorly armored and a handful of motorcycles but they have the vantage point and control of the water that she plans to use it to their advantage to the very last drop if it comes to it. For the first time in her life, Furiosa really likes her odds.

 

They survive the siege and come out of it victorious and stronger than before. The lack of an open war gives her wounds the time they need to heal properly, it gives the boys time and resources to grow, it gives the people a chance to stand and fight for better lives and a future they couldn't envision before. Yet, when the dust settles and there are only rotting corpses under the sun to watch them from the outside of the Citadel's walls, Furiosa’s mind starts an unilateral war against her on its own accord.

 

The city emerges from within the Earth, like the water that gives it live, and soon enough people start to built houses hanging from the cliff, inside the mountain, at its feet. They start to grow crops and trees, to organize themselves according to the duties that need to be done, so Furiosa gets up before the sun does and makes herself useful; she helps the mechanics and goes on the road in search for spare pieces to be used from the metallic corpses of vehicles that the desert has claimed for itself. She patrols and teaches young boys and girls how to defend themselves and how to defend their borders. She doesn’t stop, she doesn't rest, like the water that falls from the pipes and feeds the river that is to be used by The Wreched she doesn’t halt.

 

When she closes her eyes, when her treacherous body is too tired to keep being awake she dreams of the acid, rotting bog that used to be the Green Land where she was born. She dreams of the wives that perished and suffered before she was convinced to help. She dreams of Angharad, sweet Splendid Angharad that asks her over and over again why she left her behind.

 

There is not peace without redemption nor redemption without peace and Furiosa’s blood thrives with war and gasoline.

 

“He gave you life with his blood. Maybe he gave you his insanity too,” says Cheedo to her one night and there is only the tiniest bit of incredulity in her voice like maybe she believes it’s the truth, like maybe she thinks it’s a ridiculous joke.

 

“Is that what people say now? That I’m going insane?” she asks it with merely a scrap of curiosity. She has heard some of the stories that go around about satellites and long lost magnificent gardens and would like to know if her name is mentioned among other fictions too.

 

“People worry about you,” says Cheedo. Her hand warm and comforting on the side of her jaw. “We care about you, Furiosa.”

 

She doesn’t doubt it but she is restless nevertheless. Furiosa drove fast and steady, she drove like the roads were as much a part of her as her own veins. She drove through sandstorms and deadly canyons and never faltered, never had to worry about anyone caring for her but now she doesn’t drive that much anymore; there is no need for it and as soon as she slowed down her nightmares and regrets caught up with her. Like the sea creatures in Miss Giddy’s stories about the Earth-That-Was; if she stops, she dies.

 

“I know,” she says, and she makes a conscious effort to reciprocate, she puts her only complete arm around her awkwardly and tries for a hug but she is miserably out of practice.

 

There is no need for hugs on the road and she has long since learned not to show emotions, to contain them, to transform them in rage and strength and fuel. They didn’t made Imperators out of women. They didn’t made Imperators out of human beings. They only made Imperators out of guzzoline warriors and fighting machines.

 

\---------------------------------------------------------

 

Max arrives to the border of the place that isn’t his to remember only to realize that he doesn’t know how to get through it without making themselves an hostile target for whichever defensive measure they have in position. He knows Furiosa, knows her better than either of them would feel comfortable acknowledging. Definitely knows her well enough to be sure that the Citadel won’t be defenseless or at the mercy of strangers so he kills the engine and he waits.

 

“Why are we stopping?” asks the girl with the wiry hair and the attitude of a desert survivor.

 

“We’ll wait for them to invite us in.”

 

He has spoken more words in the last six days than he has spoken in a decade but he has found out that answering is the only thing that will shut them up, this girls that are no longer tied up but still remain in the backseat of his car.

 

“Did you live here?”

 

He turns back to look at the girl whose mouth is always a thin line, the one that threw that first rock at him.

 

“No,” he says, and gets out of the car and under the blinding sun to avoid any further questions. He has nothing to offer these girls, he doesn’t even have the words that they would like to hear.

 

It takes about fifteen minutes for Max to spot in the distance the thin column of dust waving up into the air after the passing of a set of wheels so he makes a quick recount of his guns and how accessible they are and waits for the other vehicle to reach his position.

 

When the motorcycle arrives and comes to a stop he is not surprised to see Furiosa, standing tall under the merciless sun and ready to fight him up or take him down and this time, with her mechanic arm in place he is not so sure he could hold his end of the fight.

 

“Are you lost?” she asks, and for a moment he thinks she has forgotten him — not forgotten, he was never here — but her lips curve in a surprising half smile and his hands relax, no longer ready to reach for a gun.

 

“What else is new?”

 

There is black motor grease smeared across her lids, across her forehead and still that sad, stern stare in her eyes that is older than time itself.

 

“Who are you?”

 

The little voice comes from behind him, from the girl that doesn’t usually talk, the one with charcoal, straight hair and the skin that is neither dark nor pale.

 

Furiosa looks at him with a question in her demeanor but he was never good with questions, never good with words — he has never been here before. She looks at him for a second and seems to understand because they both know each other well enough for that.

 

In his mind, another girl from another time calls him dad and tells him he doesn’t know her, he was never here, he doesn’t have the right to remember. Yes, yes he knows. It’s the truth but it also just a lie.

 

Furiosa looks behind him without moving an inch, Furiosa who hasn’t forgotten words, who hasn’t forgotten smiles, not completely. Furiosa with the calming tone of voice that could kill you and drive you over without a second though.

 

“I’m Furiosa. Who are you?”

 

The other two girls come out of the car and take places by their sister, side by side, the three of them with defiance in their eyes and their chins high in the air. Proud, fighting little girls, these ones.

 

“I’m Gloom. These are my sisters.”

 

Max realizes he never asked for the girls’ names, he never knew. It doesn’t matter, he will leave them here and don’t remember them like he doesn’t remember this place.

 

Furiosa gathers the girls and doesn’t flinch when he doesn’t move, his feet planted on the soil. He will not go with them to the Citadel and they both know it. This is not a place for him. It never was. It never will be.

 

Furiosa arranges the girls in the motorcycle and starts the engine.

 

“Next time you are in our borders you just have to shout ‘fool’,” she says.

 

He doesn’t tell her we will never be back but just nods slightly and she nods back. She knows, she understands, she is still Imperator Furiosa and maybe he was never more than a blood bag.

 

He gets into his car and drives to the desert. He doesn’t look back to them because his rearview mirror doesn’t reach that far.

 

\---------------------------------------------------------

 

He comes back from time to time. Never alone and never to stay forever.

 

He comes back and shouts ‘fool’ at their borders and people know to call on Furiosa and stand back and Furiosa will take a vehicle and will go to meet him. He will drive ten thousand miles to get to her but he will always wait for her to drive that last mile.

 

Sometimes, he will get back inside the city with her, he will eat and drink and sleep and use his words with moderation. He will bring along expecting mothers or wounded children and never say how he came to find them.

 

“You are getting a reputation out there,” he says one night when there is only him and Furiosa between the growing trees and under the stars, neither of them wanting to close their eyes and let the nightmare show begin.

 

“I know.”

 

She does. Furiosa still drives away when there is need to commerce for fuel of bullets and she has made an habit to keep her ears open and her mouth shut. They are not the _Citadel_ anymore, nor the _Land of Many Mothers_ because they are both long gone, waste of the past. They have fair and merciful rulers now, Capable among them, and implacable warriors. They have learnt to be kind with the ones in need and ruthless with those who intent to harm them; they have become the _Green Land of Many Warriors_ and they cherish and treasure this reputation as much as they do the memory of the losses that lead them here.

 

“You are getting a reputation in here,” she says but only makes a small pause before elaborating because she knows he’ll never ask. “Mad Max.”

 

“It suits me.”

 

“It does.”

 

 _Mad Max: the stranger that we don’t fight_ , they say, _the one who gave Furiosa her life back stabbing her on the side_ , they say, Mad Max _who bring us brothers and sisters but never stays to become one_.

 

They say other things too, silly thing about him being a devil or an angel, a traitor or a hero but she never listens to those ones. She knows the truth, she recognizes his nightmares because she has her own.

 

He will stay for a couple of days and they will spent the night together. Sometimes they’ll have sex and sometimes they will not because it is not important, of no consequence at all. The nightmares scream less when they dream in the same bed because they both have war in their blood, they both have the acid desert on their skin and it is easier to fight each other than it is not to fight at all.

 

“There are people out there looking for you,” he says. “You have become hope. Hope is a dangerous thing.”

 

“So are we,” she says, a little too quickly, a little too harsh.

 

“You are not things,” he says, his words are a statement, a fact. His words gets stuck in her throat and makes it harder to breath. Maybe he will have to stab her in the side again to make her breath once again.

 

“I will spread the word that you are ferocious,” he says under the stars.

 

“We are.”

 

“I will spread the word that you are insane.”

 

“Maybe we are that, too.”

 

He leaves the next day before the sun is up in the sky. Furiosa has never felt helpless without her mechanic arm, she has never felt less than worthy and complete, but she feels a little more alone everytime he leaves, alone with her nightmares and the fuel and the war in her blood.

 

\---------------------------------------------------------

 

He survives in a place of fire and dust. Implacable, desponded, dry. A place without future, without past, without hope.

 

He takes his leave of the Green Place of Many Warriors before the morning has set, before there would be people on the ground trying to stop him, trying to talk to him, trying to thank him for imaginary good actions.

 

He drives and picks up those whom the world discards, too innocent to survive, too good, too green and watery for the desert. He picks them up and leaves them to Furiosa because he knows she knows what to do with them, of them. He doesn’t. He never did. He has vivid dreams to remind him of that constantly.

 

There is nothing noble in it, nothing to thank him for. He drives and he survives.

 

He gets out of Furiosa’s bed with the silent efficiency of a soldier, puts guzzoline in the tank of his car and a container of water in the trunk and heads for the border. He should be at least mildly surprised to find Furiosa there waiting for him, leaning on the metallic surface of a patrol vehicle with a casual stare ahead to the horizon but he is not; she has always been faster and more insidious than him.

 

“It wouldn’t kill you to say goodbye before you go,” she says when he gets close enough to hear her. There is no accusation in her voice but merely the stark, aseptic intonation of a statement.

 

He wouldn’t know; he has never left behind anything worth saying goodbye to, but Max believes her because he has no reason not to do so. He won’t say goodbye nevertheless. He was never here; just a deceptive memory seeping between the others.

 

“I never say hello when I arrive either,” he says in an ostentatious display of communication.

 

Max will leave now and never be back to this place where he doesn’t belong, although he is slowly starting to come to term with the fact that he will be back if only because his nightmares seem to slow down at the presence of green and water. It gives him a head start. There is suddenly a fraction of a girl in front of him, calling him ‘dad’ and he knows that he has to go, he has to run again.

 

“Maybe one day I will go with you,” she says, and Max doesn’t say anything to that, doesn’t imagine what she wants him to do with this information but Furiosa looks back at him in the eyes and then he realizes; she is telling the truth, giving him fair warning of what might lay ahead.

 

Max nods, or at least he thinks he does.

 

“This should be it, but I feel like stale water in here, like I should be driving, moving, instead of uselessly rotting away.”

 

Max makes a noncommittal gesture and kicks effortlessly a rock. This is what they do to each other; she says to him what she would not say to others because he is quiet and insane but he understands and he feels just a little more like a person and a little less like dusted rock when she is around.

 

“This place is what it is because of you,” he says. His world is blood. And fire. But there is also another world now, with green and water and justice and a future.

 

“But soon it will not need me and maybe I won’t need it either.”

 

Max nods again, gets in his car and drives away because he is an expert in knowing when there are no more words left to say. He doesn’t know who killed the world; he doesn’t remember, but it is surely Furiosa and the former wives the ones that are slowly picking up the pieces and pulling it back together. Not him.

 

Never him.

 

Blood. And Fire. And the roads.

 

\---------------------------------------------------------

 

Her hair grows long and she keeps her face clean and clear like before, when she was in the Land of Many Mothers and didn’t know the intense odor of guzzoline. She patrols and looks in the rearview mirror and she doesn’t recognize herself.

 

“This is not me.” She picks up fruit fallen from the trees and feels like setting herself on fire.

 

There is a hand on her harm, cool and calm and a smile directed at her that is meant to be comforting.

 

“You only have to be patient. It takes time to get used to a new life,” says soothingly Toast The Knowing in answer to her obviou restlessness, but she has given it time, she knows how to work up patience and still feels like she needs to claw out of her own skin.

 

Furiosa has been taken, stolen away. She remembers. She has had a whole life of patience to work up her way to Imperator of Inmmortan Joe and then some more. Betrayal required trust, trust required time and time is just another word for patience.

 

“I have patience, what I lack now is purpose.”

 

This place doesn't need her anymore. It has grown and evolved far more than she could ever be able to take credit for but Furiosa is as proud of that fact as she feels useless and trapped because of it. She picks up fruit and waters the crops. This is not her, she is not needed here anymore.

 

She might have been a prisoner for most of her life but every time she smeared that black, motor grease on her face she was reminded that she had a goal; the intent to achieve justice, the resolution of one day beating up Immortan Joe.

 

She doesn’t have that anymore; not the grease on her forehead neither the resolute urgency to survive in order to achieve.

 

“You will find one,” Toast says with conviction but Furiosa takes a look at the crops and the trees and the water and is reminded of how ill-suited she is for it all.

 

Grease and fuel is meant for mechanics and dry heat and her heart doesn’t beat at the slow rhythm of gardening.

 

“Maybe. But I will not find it here.”

 

She contemplates the desert from high atop the cliff and wonders if she is mad for contemplating choosing it, choosing the sand, the dust and the road instead instead of the comfort of her cool bedroom and her fresh meals. She thinks of Max, of the fight and driving through sand storms.

 

 _Mad Max_ , they say, and she wonders about shared insanity.

 

\---------------------------------------------------------

 

He gets in his car. His guns are in place and the tank is full of fuel like many other times before, more times than he cares to count. There is something different this time around though. When he gets in the vehicle before the sun is out, Furiosa is there waiting for him, behind the steering wheel with an old brightness of her eyes — old and a little less sad — and her gaze fixed on the road ahead.

 

He doesn’t asks her what she is doing; he already knows. He doesn’t ask her why either because they know each other like they know the road, like they know the dust and the sand of the desert and the cloudless, unforgiving sky.

 

They are both survivors, they are made to fight and to drive and to never stop. They are made of bad memories and life, green and water don’t go along with nightmares.

 

They are made of guzzoline and the empty roads ahead of them.

 

He smears his eyelids with black motor grease and she never lets her hair grow and when they go back, their back seat is always full of human cargo in need of a second chance to sprout, and grow and live.

 

She shouts fool at the border and he saves his words to speak to her at night when the nightmares haunt her and wake her up.

 

The Dag and Cheedo are there to meet them, to asses if they are going to let these new people in or if they are going to show them their fearless teeth.

 

“Who are you?” asks the little boy who has just gotten off the car.

 

“We are the granddaughters of the witches they didn't manage to burn,” says Cheedo, her voice a fearful sound.

  
Max watches them in silence, watches Furiosa awkwardly hug the former wives, watches their terrible, fighting silhouettes and wonders who could have ever thought that they were anything less than what they say they are.

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to **dasku** , for going with me to the cinema and for the almost finished beta-ing and for generally bearing with me and my anxious writing ways.


End file.
